


you can tell more than you'd think from someone's handwriting, but what it doesn't tell you is usually more important

by koonutkalifee



Category: Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, past takagin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 13:18:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6053032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koonutkalifee/pseuds/koonutkalifee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The writings on Gintoki’s wrists had started as messy scrawls, the scribbles of children he had yet to meet. He could hardly read and couldn’t write and had more pressing things to think about than the black marks on his arms. He’d ignored them, with barely a vague knowledge of what the names meant, uncaring, ignorant to their significance even as the writing became more and more intelligible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can tell more than you'd think from someone's handwriting, but what it doesn't tell you is usually more important

**Author's Note:**

> [i’m so tired of the AU where your soulmate’s name is on your wrist. i want my enemy’s name on my wrist. i wanna know who i’m going to have to physically fight eventually. turn on your fucking location](http://chekhovsgum.tumblr.com/post/139383734894/cindymoon-im-so-tired-of-the-au-where-your)   
>  [ your enemy’s name on one wrist and your soulmate the another. no clue which is which. hope it’s not the same name on both wrists. ](http://chekhovsgum.tumblr.com/post/139383734894/cindymoon-im-so-tired-of-the-au-where-your)
> 
> look i know i'm pretty obsessed with gintama but this is totally about gintama

There were two names on his wrists, and he’d taken to covering both of them.

There were thin strips of white on an already pale arm, which wrapped neatly around the places on his skin where the names would be. One bandage on each wrist, wrapped around enough times that the characters everyone knows are there cannot be seen, even faintly.

 

The writings on Gintoki’s wrists had started as messy scrawls, the scribbles of children he had yet to meet. He could hardly read and couldn’t write and had more pressing things to think about than the black marks on his arms. He’d ignored them, with barely a vague knowledge of what the names meant, uncaring, ignorant to their significance even as the writing became more and more intelligible.

It was only after meeting Shouyou that he managed to read the names inked into his skin, and then some time later that he met the name on his left wrist.

Takasugi Shinsuke had to be his mortal enemy. There was no way that he could be his soulmate.

 

It’s a strange thing, having your worst enemy’s name branded into you from birth. There are rumours as to why it happens – Amanto viruses, an incurable disease, God playing tricks. There are people looking into curing it, and there are people saying the names are miracles, and there are people like Gintoki who would rather just be quiet about the whole thing.

Some people hide both names. Some hide neither. Kagura keeps both her names hidden under bracelets like he does, and Shinpachi never rolls his sleeves past his wrists, though he’s seen the curves and lines of their names often enough.

 

They’d been fifteen when the years and years and years of knowing that they were one of the two most important people to the other finally got to them.

Afterwards they would pretend it hadn’t happened and then after that it would happen again, both of them too bloody and empty to care which title applied to them.

They were something to each other, half of everything perhaps, or just enough that the first time they fuck, bloody and exhausted and too young and half dead, there’s nothing to stop either of them from wondering if this is what love feels like, because it isn’t truly hate anymore.

They couldn’t be mortal enemies but there was no way they were soulmates; they’d been fighting with each other since the beginning and they’d been fighting with each other since they’d met and it surely wasn’t possible for either label to wholly apply to them.

They never saw the other name on the other’s wrist, not until much much later.

 

When Gintoki meets Hijikata the puzzle pieces sort of begin to click into place. He sees his own name branded white into Hijikata’s wrist (his name had been white on Takasugi’s wrist too, and he’d never seen any name a colour other than black apart from his own) even as Hijikata sees his name on Gintoki’s right wrist.

Hijikata immediately hates him for it, and Gintoki hates him right back.

 

Takasugi had vanished after the war, vanished after he’d watched Gintoki slice off Shouyou’s head and smile as he did so. Gintoki could hardly fault him for it. He would have liked to run off and never see himself again, had he the opportunity. He couldn’t separate his soul from his body and so instead he chose to separate his head from it, allowed himself to be caught and almost hated his executioner for setting him free.

Just another person he owed his life to. Just another debt he wouldn’t ever pay back.

 

Hijikata and Gintoki eventually agree that they aren’t soulmates and they aren’t mortal enemies. Hijikata is forced to accept this eventually and Gintoki never cared in the first place, because Takasugi had been somewhere in between too.

Gintoki learns at the worst possible time that the name on Hijikata’s other wrist is Okita Mitsuba and Hijikata is too tired to squirm under his dead-eyed gaze.

They sit side by side eating crackers that are more spice than cracker and complain to the clear sky about the rain. It may be the first peaceful moment between them.

 

Katsura sees the names on his wrists and in one of his few moments of clarity tells Gintoki that nowhere is it written that the names are in black and white, that the people inked into his skin have to fit in one box or another. They are twelve at the time and Takasugi is somewhere else and Gintoki doesn’t answer.

Katsura never brings it up again, not even when he realises the name on Gintoki’s other wrist belongs to a member of the Shinsengumi, and its demon vice-chief as well. Gintoki never thanks him for it.

 

Even though he hadn’t been able to read them, he’d seen the messy scrawls on his wrists grow neater and neater. By the time he’d turned five they were legible and by the time he was fifteen Takasugi’s was beautiful and Hijikata’s was not.

The names look a little like the handwriting of the person they belong to; Takasugi had spent more time than it had been worth telling Gintoki to improve his handwriting because he didn’t need his ugly name in an ugly script as well. Gintoki tried to make his writing worse.

Takasugi’s name is beautiful on his wrist, beautiful enough that it’s an ugly reminder that Takasugi grew up rich, grew up educated and stifled and held a captive and forced to be the kind of samurai he wanted nothing to do with.

Hijikata’s handwriting is not pretty. Hijikata’s handwriting looks a little like his own, scratchy and messy and blocky and simple, as though he’d never learned calligraphy either and had instead learned to write by copying out of journals and papers and scraps of rubbish he’d picked up off the street.

He’d almost liked Hijikata’s more than he’d liked Takasugi’s.

 

Hijikata’s name burns against his wrist now like Takasugi’s had. Takasugi had stopped burning a long, long time ago but every so often he’ll feel embers against his wrist and doesn’t sleep those nights because that just means nightmares that will need drowning at the bottom of a bottle and he has children now, children that need looking after and he can’t do that too much anymore.

Hijikata’s name feels a little different to Takasugi’s. He can’t remember how Takasugi’s name had felt exactly, but Hijikata’s is less of an itch and more of a slow, smouldering heat. It’s too hot against his skin, and on the worst days he swears he can feel every line burnt into him, can feel every stroke of the white-hot pen searing the sounds into his wrist.

He’s imagining it. He must be. He touches the black ink and his skin is as cool as it ever is to the touch.

 

There are bandages around Hijikata’s arms and the sleeves of the Shinsengumi are deliberately long and Gintoki knows now that Hijikata designed the uniforms. He’d only seen his own name so fast because of the colour of it, the bandage only slipping enough to reveal one white character that could be read as silver.

The bandage on Gintoki’s wrist had come off at the same time, as convenient and inconvenient as it had been. At least it had meant no awkward conversations but Gintoki is so tired of hating people and if Hijikata had just been one more meaningless face then he wouldn’t have had to hate him.

He can’t hate Hijikata for very long. He’s too much like Takasugi before Takasugi had started hating him and Gintoki is so lonely all of the time, even as his family grows and grows.

 

Hijikata sees the name etched into Gintoki’s other wrist just hours after he’s arrested on terrorism charges.

It’s been a long, long night and enough impossibly strange things have happened that he doesn’t care the other name on Gintoki’s wrist belongs to an active terrorist, one infamous enough that his name is known to them.

He knows that Gintoki knows he is too tired to care, which is why Gintoki allowed his bandage to slip enough for Hijikata to see when he was clipping the handcuffs on. Hijikata pulls Gintoki’s sleeve over his wrist so that the Mimawarigumi don’t see the name, because there’s no way that they’d let it go as easily as he is.

Gintoki can always be arrested for it tomorrow.

 

“Can you feel it?” Gintoki asks one day. He presses Hijikata’s hand against his burning wrist and Hijikata nods slowly.

They wouldn’t normally touch each other so casually, even in bed together, even after being _something_ for so long. But Gintoki is tired and injured today, more than usual, and Hijikata is the same. Hijikata leaves his hand against Gintoki’s skin and hums yes quietly.

They lie silently, side by side, for a long time, the only thing connecting them Hijikata’s hand on Gintoki’s wrist. Hijikata’s name smoulders, the heat burning the two of them until it fades, slowly. Hijikata falls asleep with his hand like that, though he knows Gintoki hasn’t slept when he wakes up.

 

The names scarred into Gintoki’s wrists are not those of his mortal enemies and not those of his soulmates and not one of each, as they should have been. They are the names of two people he just happened to be the same as.

He doesn’t want to think about what will happen when they meet.

**Author's Note:**

> things i do with my free time include cry about gintama


End file.
